Global Inequalities and Higher Education

Whose interests are you serving?

Elaine Unterhalter, Vincent Carpentier

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781350306264
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación superior

Examines how higher education has contributed to widening inequalities and might contribute to change.By exploring questions of access, finance and pedagogy, it considers global higher education as a space for understanding the promises and pressures associated with competing demands for economic growth, equity, sustainability and democracy.

Part 1

Mapping Inequalities Conceptually

1Educating the Other: Standpoint and Theory in the ‘Internationalization’ of Higher Education

Allan Luke

Standpoint

How adequate are current theoretical standpoints, tools, and categories for explaining the flows of international students to Anglo/American/European universities? There is a growing literature on the internationalization of higher education, well represented in this volume. This includes critical policy analyses that attempt to outline the linkages between state, economy, and university institutional strategies (Mok, 2007), the analysis of marketing discourses and strategies (Sidhu, 2003; Mok and Tan, 2004), studies of digital teaching and learning in offshore and external university studies by international students (Doherty, 2006), second language and academic writing studies (Kubota, 2003), and a vast qualitative literature on the cultural and learning experiences of international students and their teachers in the West (Singh and Doherty, 2004; Kettle, 2005, 2007; Marginson et al., 2010). Taken together, this work has begun to provide us with a rich analytic and empirical description of the internationalization of universities in the context of cultural globalization and, indeed, economic crisis.

This essay takes a different analytic tack and historical standpoint to the study of them and us, insiders and outsiders (cf. Foley et al., 2001), in the internationalization of education. It is based on my experience as a senior academic of Chinese ancestry working the field from ‘both sides’ from 1995 to 2005 – first, as head of an Australian Faculty of Education extending its reach into Asian education, and second, as a member of a senior management team of a leading East Asian university negotiating bilateral agreements with UK, US, and Australian institutions. Throughout, it reflects upon the (my)optics of ‘being Asian’ in a White-dominated Western university system – and the insider knowledge of ‘being Asian’ in a Han Chinese-dominated East Asian system (Ang, 2002; Luke, 2009a, 2009b, 2010).

My expository case is that the recent history of Australian involvement in Asia via internationalization has yielded: (1) the emergence of a complex, chaotic, and unpredictable edubusiness, whose prioritization of the financial ‘bottom line’ has supplanted clear normative educational and, indeed, overtly ideological intents; and (2) the construction, along the way, of different versions or ‘namings’ of the international Others of international student cohorts. This, I argue, distinguishes the current internationalization of universities from that of colonial and Cold War eras.

Yet even as these students and their institutions are structurally positioned, constructed, and reconstructed in this new political economy of higher education, there is ample evidence of their position taking and agency. This is not a one way street of ideological indoctrination, marginalization, or exploitation – but rather an archetypal instance of the push/pull dialectics of cultural and economic globalization (Luke and Luke, 1999; Rizvi, 2000). To make the narrative case, I describe my experience in Australia and Asia, deliberately shifting the optics and standpoint of this piece. First, I raise the class, regional, and cultural interests at work in universities’ engagement with Asia – outlining the complex ‘differences within difference’ (Luke and Luke, 1999) that are brought into play in the development of programs and the relative agency of Asian institutions and students in setting the stage for international programs. Second, I describe how UK, US, and Australian international marketization appears to many academics working in East Asian universities and governments. This is, then, a double take on internationalization, with comparative cases of: (1) how our current approaches conceptualize and define the Other of international education; and, (2) how the East Asian Other has come to view the marketing behaviour of Western universities. It is an attempt to flip the dialectics of postcolonial and critical analysis of internationalization by asking how the Other is constructing and defining ‘Us’.

Across three decades of my work as an academic in Canada, Australia, and Singapore – there has been one constant. Chinese-American by birth, I have always been a visible ‘person of colour’ within White-dominated, Anglo-European institutions. My own work has been on the sociology of curriculum and literacy in schools, focusing on issues of social justice and equity, marginalization, and exclusion. As much as minority status within such institutions confers structural positioning and, at times, exclusion – there are instances where White-dominated institutions find it necessary to call upon its Others for strategic institutional purposes. The current press for internationalization is a case in point.

Yet second wave feminist work and critical race theory offer three salient insights about the Anglo/European university: (1) that governance lays principally in and works through the practices of patriarchal masculinity; (2) that these systems of governance are principally institutional representations of White/Anglo/European standpoint; and (3) that the unmarked norm of Western rationality provides a ‘naturalizing’ device for its regulation of Others of all sorts and kinds (e.g., Brooks and McKinnon, 2001; C. Luke, 2001, 2005). I raise these issues around the optics of universities, then, from yet another oscillating position of Otherness. My intention here is to ask: Who is theorizing and positioning whom, on what grounds, with what historical precedents, and with what educational and material consequences for students, teachers, researchers, and university administrators, as well as for their institutions, communities, and nation states.

Colonization, aid, and development

Travelling from ‘home’ to the North/West for informal and formal cultural and political education has a distinguished and ambiguous history (Robertson et al., 1994). The education of the cultural, linguistic, and racial Other in Anglo/European higher education systems is not a new phenomenon. Its most notable historical precedents were, of course, extensions of the project of colonialism. From the eighteenth to the early twentieth century, British, French, and other European universities established training grounds for colonial civil servants, teachers, the military, missionaries, and, later, technical experts (Pennycook, 1998). The expectation was that they would return to colonies with the requisite bodily disposition, cultural traits, linguistic facility, and technical expertise to represent empire and, where needed, to build colonial infrastructure and operate its institutions. To augment this, colonial universities were established in key outposts, extending the training reach of empire.

In the last century, the Soviet Union and China provided ideological and technological training to nationals from emergent socialist and communist countries in Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas, with the aim of the spread of political ideology and revolutionary consciousness. The United States, likewise, offered further study to expatriates from client states, at times through academic and non-governmental organizations (e.g., Fulbright, Hoover). There were instances where security agencies like the CIA participated in the sponsorship and movement of foreign government officials, intellectuals, military, and technical experts to American study (Reisch, 2005).¹

In the post-war period, the cross border flows of ‘international’ students were undertaken principally under the auspices of aid and development funding (Altbach, 1998). Australia’s Colombo Plan, the US Fulbright system, and other aid/training models gave scholars and leaders from what was then termed the ‘developing’ world an opportunity to undertake higher degree studies in major Western universities. While their stated rationale was to improve human capital and intercultural exchange, they were a bid to extend diplomatic and political, cultural and corporate influence internationally. Over the last decade, Australian government officials have consistently raised the effects of the Colombo Plan, noting which East Asia government ministers and corporate leaders received postgraduate training in Australia. The diverse personal, professional and cultural impacts of study abroad on such students are well documented.²

Much of the foregoing account is based on specific historical centre/margin political, economic, and military relationships. The idiosyncratic aims and good intentions of academic staff and departments aside, universities have served the extension of state and corporate power through the international dissemination of knowledge, technical expertise, lingua franca, and, indeed, particular forms of ideological disposition (Spring, 1998; Graham et al., 2007).

Yet the question of educational effects and consequences is a different matter. As the scholarship and writings, biographies and accounts of those intellectuals and students who travelled to the Anglo/Eurocentric educational centre attest, the educational effects and social consequences of this training have not always aligned with originating state regional geopolitical and economic intents. That is, we find amongst a broad spectrum of political leaders from Nehru to Lee Kwan Yew, and critical intellectuals and artists from Spivak to Ghosh, instances where contact with canonical Western knowledge and culture generated alterior, critical and radical knowledge and practice. There is an as yet emergent history being written on the engagement of Maori, Aborigines, and other indigenous peoples with university education, raising equally vexed questions around intercultural travel, border crossing, and vernacular cultural effects.³ Yet it is axiomatic that the ideologies of particular trainings, however hegemonic, do not necessarily yield the self-same reproduction of knowledge. In any era, student uptake, use, and transformation of educationally acquired knowledge is, at best, an empirical question and, in other instances, an example of Foucault’s (1982) principle of the local unpredictability of discourse at work.

Edubusiness

While the foregoing offers a plausible account of flows of international students East/West, North/South in colonial and neocolonial, hot and cold war conditions, it cannot offer a comprehensive explanation of current contexts. This is in part due to the diminished funding and neoliberal governance structures that have progressively set the context for the internationalization of universities over two decades (Marginson and Considine, 2000). Specifically, while the recruitment and training of international students served and serves the interests of ideological and cultural incorporation by nation states, and the production of specialized technical expertise for globalizing industry – its major function in many American and Commonwealth universities now is revenue generation in the face of declining state and endowment funding.

The rhetoric of universities and governments aside, over the past two decades a complex and chaotic market has been established. Australian, UK, and New Zealand universities currently use overseas student income to cross-subsidize the undergraduate and postgraduate education of domestic students. Further, there has been a major expansion of externally delivered programs via online offerings, offshore campuses, and other modes of distance education, with fierce competition for market share in Asia and the Middle East. This has led to more complicated and diverse student bodies – with university staff encountering new and unprecedented ‘aliens’: heterogeneous in cultural history and lingua franca, religion and regional, social class and community affiliations, credentials and training histories, background knowledge schemata and motivation structures, and unprecedented professional pathways through globalizing economies.

This is nothing less than a radical change in campus cultural demographics, interactional and educational dynamics – with traditional ‘Sandstone’ universities like Queensland and Sydney hitting targets of 30 per cent and regional universities like Central Queensland peaking at 45 per cent international students in recent years. All of these institutions historically have evolved as virtual White, English-speaking monocultures, with historically minor cohorts of Aboriginal, Torres Strait Islander, and first-generation Asian and Middle Eastern migrant students.

Australian international education has become a 15 billion dollar ‘export’ industry, its second largest export industry (Gillard, 2009). Between 1995 and 2006, overall numbers of international students rose from 57,000 to 180,000 (Australian Education International, 2009). This amounts to a shift from 8.4 per cent to 20 per cent of total enrolment, accounting a growth in university revenue from 5.9 per cent to 30 per cent. The number of Chinese students in the post-Tiananmen period, when visas were embargoed centrally by the Chinese government, has expanded from 1500 to 46,000; student flows from the Middle East and India have consistently grown. This expansion has paralleled progressively declining per capita federal funding for Australian students, a matter currently under review by the Labor federal government.

This international education for profit model is the principal driver in the current equation – superseding ideological and political, cultural, and economic rationales. Revenue appears to have trumped ideology and culture (Graham et al., 2007). The result is a complex mix of student demographic and cultural variables, with new forms of Otherness entering the Western academy. While governments and universities document the increasing diversity of countries of origin, gender, level, and courses – there is little aggregate data on the socioeconomic, ethnic, religious characteristics of student cohorts, as is available in national schooling data. This massive expansion of overall numbers of international students is a key element of the structural reorganization of universities, a collateral effect of the shift towards technocratic corporatism that began in Australia under the Hawke Labor government in 1988.

During the expansion of international programs, many universities have undergone a wilful deskilling of policy on internationalization. Australian universities in the 1990s moved into a de facto internationalization as marketization model – with sophisticated branding, marketing, and advertising, at times assisted by government and statutory agencies. This extended into co-marketing, co-development, and corporate relationships with oth...